Lullmage Mentor + Doubling Season + Elspeth, Storm Slayer + Exalted Sunborn
How it works
- Whenever an opponent casts a spell, activate Lullmage Mentor by tapping seven untapped Merfolk, countering that spell.
- Lullmage Mentor triggers, creating a total of eight 1/1 Merfolk creature tokens.
- Repeat.
This ingenious lock relies on Lullmage Mentor as the engine, allowing you to tap your amassed army of Merfolk to continuously counter every spell your opponents cast. Whenever that ability successfully counters a spell, the Mentor triggers to create a Merfolk token, which is instantly multiplied into a massive swarm by the cascading token-doubling effects of Doubling Season, Elspeth, Storm Slayer, and Exalted Sunborn. Because these replacement effects compound together—with Doubling Season doubling the base token count, and Elspeth, Storm Slayer and Exalted Sunborn further multiplying the resulting total—a single counterspell generates more than enough fresh Merfolk bodies to immediately pay the seven-tap activation cost again. The result is an airtight, recursive counterspell lock that completely neutralizes your opponents' ability to resolve spells while flooding your board with an endless army of tokens.